to whoever it may concern
to whoever has forgotten that being an educator is more about the expansion of what makes up tomorrow and less about the revival of what made up yesterday
to whoever gives a second thought to the children being force-fed the manual information decided upon in a 10 by 12 room with walls as blank as the minds of those same children who might as well go by numbers than by names

i hope you know that you have somehow managed to take a beautiful aspect of life, to take the gift of knowledge, and to warp it into the sickest form of mind control
i hope you know that you have somehow managed to take the spirits of thousands eager minds and crush them down until even the biggest, roundest circle became the smallest, sharpest square
i hope you know that i blame you for the fact that most of my conversations consist of small talk, that my 16 year old skin has wrinkles worse than some of my own mother, that i have no idea how to not become a pup in a dog eats dog world
why, you ask? well because i see more cut and paste with ideas than with art nowadays but hey, thank god for those science classes because otherwise i never would’ve seen that the way the school system works is just the same as the water cycle: evaporating from the large bodies of originality existing in the wide ranges of our brains, condensing into just the right fit of what we should know, precipitating a new generation disposed back into the world with only the droplets of human beings that don’t look like the others becoming the runoff
and thank god for those english classes because how else would i know to use the perfect literary term to describe the way i could just as easily be a caged bird; body soul and mind trapped in how i should write in what i should read in the way i should interpret my literature, in the way that god forbid i try to fly outside of the metal bars that everyone else stays behind because then i become “difficult to work with”, “not fit for the class”, best of all “disruptive”
and thank god for the history classes because who else better to remind me of my place as a woman than those 43 men who’ve made the nation into the beauty it is today, racist, sexist, and homophobic in all its glory; what better way to promote nonviolence than to make war more about dates generals and locations and less about how those exact dates used to be anniversaries birthdays holidays who no one would ever celebrate again, about the claw marks on the bodies of the generals that they tried to hide after a night of their guilty conscience replaying the scene where the trigger of a gun replaced the sound of their heartbeat, about the miles of land in those locations that may have been green and brown and beautiful but the only color seen anymore was red and red and red
and of course thank god for the math classes because if not for my counting to 100 and back what other way would i stop my panic attacks quick enough to finish up that one sheet of homework, that one sheet that has more problems than breath intakes per second (i would know i counted remember); because how else would i measure precisely the right amount of inches that i can cut into my skin and still be alive to take tomorrows test; because now i know the exact angle i should position the chair in and the exact coordinate point the noose needs to hang on and the exact time the chair should fall away taking along with it every memory of pen paper textbook notebook 3 ring binder – all fit to the brim with every formula except the one on how to stay alive
to whoever’s swallowed their horror at such a supposed pure mind speaking such hate, to whoever’s still reading because hey yeah this shit is true, to whoever actually cares
i want more, WE want more
we want more than 7 hours of a show with poor lighting and the same scene over and over again just with a different backdrop
we want more than being preached to about work ethic and effort by zombies who’s eyes haven’t been lit by the fire of passion since the years all leading up to a gown a hat and a slip of paper, by the people who dare to say they know how hard it is for us as they all place ticking bombs in the form of deadlines on the same day, by the bitter souls of those who think they know better just because they maybe once tried to fight this same battle (even though they lost)
and maybe we’re ungrateful because at least it’s easier to take away every possibility of self discovery, at least we don’t have to figure out who and what we want to be as we’re already told how we should be, at least we don’t have to do something as crazy as create our own selves
or maybe you’re just scared because what happens when we learn to flip the switch on, what happens when we tap into everything you’ve taught us to block out, what happens when the people in power are no longer you but the ones who you labeled
“disruptive”
“deadbeat”
“dumb”